Falling for the fells all over again

14/07/2024 09:35

It's 20 years since Richard Askwith wrote Feet in the Clouds but has the sport of fell running managed to keep its soul?

It's half a lifetime since I took my first tentative steps as a runner on the English fells. I can still feel the dark menace of the cold Cumbrian clouds and the stomach-churning vastness of that first, mountainous ascent. 

On the bright side, the air was pure and the studs of my newly-purchased shoes bit nicely into the turf. For an hour or so, I enjoyed myself, relishing the challenges of a form of running that tests agility, daring and balance as well as speed and stamina – in a landscape of wild beauty.

Then fatigue kicked in, followed, a few hours later, by utter, despairing exhaustion. Each joy of fell running, I learned, has its grim flipside. All that glorious open space lures you into attempting too much. The wild unsuitability of the terrain, so exhilarating when you're full of bounce, brings pain and anxiety with every step once you're staggering.

That wild mountain beauty is often lashed by savage mountain weather; or it may be sunk in impenetrable cloud. The remoteness means that you can't just give up; the cloud means that, if you keep going, it may not be in the right direction. And the long descents, far from offering relief from the gruelling climbs, inflict their own special torture on quads and joints.

Over time, the multi-layered ordeal can reduce you to a shivering, bruised, exhausted husk of your stronger self – and you realise in your cold bones that fells can be frightening places.

That's how it was for me, at any rate, back in the early 1990s. I ended that first day with a fierce certainty: that I would never attempt this stupid, reckless, miserable sport again.

Yet somehow, in a matter of weeks, I was persuaded back for one more try, and within a few months I had learned enough about fell running to have fallen hopelessly in love with it.

My conversion had many catalysts, starting with the discovery that, if I managed my pace to match my abilities, the pains of the fells were more survivable than my appalled southern sensibilities had at first assumed. Proper fell runners, I learnt, simply shrugged them off.

Then I noticed that the sheer range and depth of the hardships to be endured was part of the appeal. At worst, it felt great when it was over. At best, there was a profound satisfaction to be had from not being broken by these challenges and, sometimes, rising to them.

But it was fell running's soul that hooked me. This was a sport rooted in the land, rooted in the past, rooted in the spirits of small, rural communities. It was a sport of hill-farmers and gamekeepers, stonemasons and mountain guides. Riches played no part in it, glory very little. Its champions combined Olympic-level athleticism with the hardiness of polar explorers, yet most British sports fans had never heard of them.

Fell running's supreme moments – from "Dalzell's race" at Burnsall in 1910 to Fred Reeves' final Grasmere record in 1978, or Billy Bland's sub-14-hour Bob Graham Round in 1982 – involved magnificent running, but also an almost superhuman mastery of the mountain environment.

Kenny Stuart, the Threlkeld gardener whose still unbroken records include a barely comprehensible 1 hour 25 minutes 34 seconds for running up and down Ben Nevis, used to "run on scree as if it was Axminster carpet", according to one rival. And when Chris Brasher, Olympic gold medallist, described Joss Naylor's 1972 Lakeland 24-hour record as "a memory equal to the greatest Olympic races I have seen", he had in mind not just the 63 peaks that the Wasdale shepherd had scaled but the "biblical" storm in which he did so, when "rain drummed on my hood so fiercely as to obliterate thought" and "it did not seem possible that anyone could be moving on the mountains".

Comparisons with my own feeble struggles through storms and scree magnified my awe at such supermen and women. But they weren't just tough: they were modest. They did what had to be done, then talked about the weather and the scenery, or the fortunes of their fellow runners. It wasn't about them, they would explain: just the shared struggle between runners and mountains – in which no individual ambition mattered as much as the collective well-being of the fells and their inhabitants (including the sheep that Naylor sometimes attended to mid-record attempt).

Yet it was about them, for me and others, because they showed us what a runner could be. I had had running heroes before, on road and on track, but they were just athletes. The giants of the fells were athletes squared – and the dream of becoming a bit more like them began to animate my training.

Eventually I became so obsessed with fell running that I wrote a book about it, Feet in the Clouds, which came out in 2004. And now, with a new 20th anniversary edition just arriving in the bookshops, I find myself once again reflecting on the sport and, rather awkwardly, being asked for my views on it.

It's awkward because things have changed. Me, for a start: slower, feebler, less tolerant of long journeys to the fells. But mainly the sport itself, which has evolved in those intervening decades in ways that some welcome more than others.

Most visibly, it has grown. Membership of the Fell Runners' Association (FRA) has almost doubled since my book came out – and that's just the hard core. Participation in the wider sense (including people attempting the Bob Graham Round, the 66-mile, 24-hour challenge that is one of my book's main themes) has more than doubled. Some blame Feet in the Clouds, although most would concede that other factors (smartphones, social media, population growth, wider car ownership) may have played a greater part. Nor are the increased numbers necessarily unwelcome, although congestion can be a problem at prestigious races. Back in 2004, the big worry was that the sport was dying out.

A more pressing concern, for some, is that all this new blood has changed the sport's soul. This is hard to judge, but something has certainly changed. When I was starting out, I was an obvious anomaly: a southerner from running's mainstream, trying to adapt to the rugged values of the fells. Today, outsiders are everywhere, and some are better
than others at bridging the gap between the modern mainstream from which they come and the old-fashioned culture of the fells.

Naylor sometimes ran in his work boots, or in work trousers cut off at the knee, while George Brass, winner and only finisher of the storm-ravaged 1962 Lake District Mountain Trial, used an old fertiliser sack to keep out the worst of the cold.

For the modern runner, such a primitive approach is unthinkable. We're used to running in hundreds of pounds' worth of cutting-edge kit, even in the tamest urban environment, and we instinctively throw money at the challenge of the fells, too. Current must-have products in the booming running-and-adventure sector include graphene-enhanced fell shoes, carefully calibrated layers of lightweight, breathable outerwear, hi-tech underwear, compression-wear, joint-supports, wind goggles, hydration vests; electrolyte drinks and energy gels developed with extreme adventurers in mind; and (although it's banned in FRA races) near-infallible wrist-worn sat-nav.

Newcomers who come to the fells via the slickly-run growth industries of trail running, ultra running and adventure racing are already used to all this. For traditionalists, however, it embodies a culture clash, between fell running's rough-and-ready local roots and the "me"-focused runner-consumers of more prosperous regions.

You don't have to go far to hear mutterings about "football crowds" and "narcissists" spoiling races with their entitled attitudes, or about well-heeled "box-tickers" who crowd famous start lines merely to brag about it on social media. And plenty of race organisers long for the days when runners just soaked up the hardships of the fells, rather than complaining (or worse) about poor facilities, non-existent goody bags and race-related injuries.

But which, in that case, is "real" fell running? Is it the heroically cheap-and-cheerful activity that I celebrated in Feet in the Clouds? Or is it the sophisticated, modern version of sport that you'll usually encounter in traditional or social media?

In the latter version, the headline events are big, efficiently managed, and slickly packaged. The biggest stars have sponsors and global ambitions; a few are full-time athletes. Their exploits are filmed, celebrated in new and old media, cheered on in real time by "dot-watching" fans following trackers. The biggest events, such as the Montane Spine Race series, are eye-wateringly expensive to enter.

Some would argue that the Montane Spine Races (up and down the Pennine Way, in winter and summer) involve trail running, not fell running. Yet the Pennines look very much like fells to me, and to argue that race winners such as Jack Scott or Jasmin Paris are not fell runners would be absurd.

Similarly, it would be perverse to insist that the Yorkshire Three Peaks Race – an FRA-sanctioned event whose list of past winners is a roll call of fell running greats – is a trail race, just because it involves some trails and has been used as an "index race" for the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc.

What we can say is that fell running no longer has the fells to itself, and it isn't always clear where it stops and other kinds of off-road running begin. Instead, most runners drift with little thought from one sub-discipline to another, creating a melting pot of traditions and attitudes. And as the kit industry bombards us all with its marketing, it's easy for low-tech traditionalists to feel marginalised.

Yet I don't think their sport is really losing its soul. Most fell running takes place far below the radar of the headline-following public, and for every fell race that is packaged like a London road race, there are dozens that remain basic, no-frills, local affairs. And while there will always be newcomers who expect to be looked after in the customer-comes-first manner to which they are accustomed, they rarely last long in the sport – because its realities are too uncomfortable.

Even the sport's elite have more in common with earlier generations than you might expect. Yes, they are more likely to be doctors, teachers or vets (or sports professionals) than shepherds or gamekeepers. They are better-equipped than their predecessors, and benefit from better nutrition, as well as a much better collective understanding of sport science.

But watch them in action – easily done these days, thanks to the internet – and as often as not you'll encounter an extraordinary minimalism: just runner, shoes, shorts, vest and an unnerving lack of visible concern for the pains and perils of the mountains. Nicky Spinks' fuelling strategy for her epic 132-mile double Bob Graham Round in 2016 relied largely on fish and chips and baked beans, while Jasmin Paris, the only woman ever to complete the Barkley Marathons, actively campaigns against the excesses of the running industry through the Green Runners – as does Finlay Wild, 12-time winner of the Ben Nevis race. It's not technology that makes these people record-breakers (otherwise we'd all do it). It's resilience.

And that's the sport's unchanging truth. Good kit insulates you against the hardships of the fells for the blink of an eye. Thereafter, it's down to you. And that, paradoxically, is what runners love about the sport, because it forces us to find our stronger selves.

Fell running will always be a rough, uncomfortable pastime: a raw struggle between frail runner and mighty mountain, in a hostile environment for running. To be good at it, or even to enjoy it, you need to find an accommodation in your heart, whereby you accept that the thrill and the beauty of it justify the discomforts. And that's a state of mind that money can't buy.

A new 20th anniversary edition of "Feet in the Clouds", with an updated epilogue by the author and an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, is published by Aurum Press (£9.99)

June issue out

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